


conversation on the balcony of your fifth floor one-bedroom flat, eight a.m.

by perennials



Series: whence [7]
Category: Kuroko no Basuke | Kuroko's Basketball
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-11
Updated: 2019-08-11
Packaged: 2020-08-19 01:24:30
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 410
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20201446
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/perennials/pseuds/perennials
Summary: A post-modernist painting of absence.





	conversation on the balcony of your fifth floor one-bedroom flat, eight a.m.

Kuroko doesn’t balk at his pretty face. Ryouta likes that. Beneath the glamor of his smile and his teeth and his gums, all of him glittering like cheap plastic-backed rhinestones you can buy in bulk from craft stores, Ryouta is a simple person. He understands with a profound not-sadness that his beauty will never be separable from his soul the same way that the sky and the sea will always bleed across the boundary into each other’s lives, ruining photographs and other variations of daydreams. This is not something worth mourning. There are worse places to be, he knows this, but still. But still, but Kuroko.

Kuroko doesn’t balk, the end. Kuroko may blink his eyes at you curiously if he has something to say but nine times out of ten he will not say it. Kuroko in middle school cries out of sadness and then again out of joy in high school, but he does this secretly, in the empty space behind the bleachers while the rest of Seirin floats up into the rafters with smiles and norwegian laughter. Kuroko in college, smoking a cigarette. This is not an action but an image. A post-modernist painting of absence.

Ryouta does not marvel at it. He has run out of breath to spend on things like free-falling and catching yourself on the final rung of the ladder. Whoever said nineteen was a tightrope must have taken the wrong elevator upstairs because he spends his hours in denominations of three and eats silver for dessert, and yet Kuroko does not leave him. At twenty they move in together against the recommendation of Midorima, who has read the feng shui of Ryouta’s apartment and firmly believes he should move to Hokkaido and adopt an iguana, and Akashi, who does not engage in the outdated practice of giving people keys to things instead of safe boxes. In the morning Kuroko is dreaming out of the window with his elbows on the bird-wire frame of metal, bedhead curled up around his ears, his cheeks. Ryouta walks over and leans down into his milk-breath cinnamon sharp face, tastes the bitter throb of nicotine. When Kuroko leans up on his toes to kiss him, he feels all the glitter fall off his face. His soul emerges like blood from a gutted fish, throbbing from the immaculate slide of the sushi knife across the heart-side of its chest.

A mist-laden morning, a smile. “You’re beautiful.”

Who’s talking?

**Author's Note:**

> [twitter](https://twitter.com/nikiforcvs)
> 
> wrote this as a 5 minute no editing no looking back challenge on twitter but caved and went back and edited it afterwards. fun times. thanks for reading about the fun times. if you liked it, well, that's cool
> 
> have a good one


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